Anyone played with the (newish) Casio xj-a140 projector?

[drventure]

That whole series is lit via a red laser/blue LED combo. Supposedly generates 2500 lumens at 1800:1 contrast.

But the kicker is the lights last 20000 plus hours, instead of 2000 to 3000 like most projector bulbs.

My Panasonic Ae-900U (a really nice projector, up till now) just bit it, after I'd had it for only a little over a year and a half. Not a great run rate, and the bulb was up above 3300 hours, so it was really in need of replacement anyway.

So I'm looking for something to replace it with. The casio seems like a decent unit. But noone around here has one setup so I can see what the picture looks like.

Anybody played with one of these?

[javeryh]

How much are they?  I'm going to be in the market for a projector in the next 12-18 months and I have a lo of research ahead of me...

[drventure]

849$ at best buy. I'm considering just picking one up tomorrow to try it. They have a 30 day money back, so, what the hell.

Looking online, I couldn't find any better price on em anywhere, and no reviews either 

[drventure]

Ok, well, I picked one up yesterday just to find out.


When I compared the specs between the casio and my old panasonic ae900e, I suspected I'd be in for a bit of a letdown.

And that's exactly what happened.

First off, I will say a couple positive things about the casio.

1) it's BRIGHT. Did I mention how BRIGHT the dang thing is? I had to turn the brightness way down actually to keep the picture from saturating. Even in the middle of the day is a somewhat sunny room, the image was completely visible and watchable.
2) it's small, and white. If you were ceiling mounting it, it'd almost disappear into a normal white ceiling.
3) It'd got keystone correction, which seems to work pretty good.
4) if the lamp life really is 20000+ hours, that would truly be awesome.

But I won't be keeping it that long  :'(

that's about all the pros, unfortunately.

Now the cons.
1) The Zoom is rotten, you simply can't zoom most TV source material properly. You'll end up with stuff above or below the picture, or you'll have the sides cut off. I couldn't figure any combination that worked smoothly. With the ae900u, get the picture to the right size what simply a matter of pressing the ASPECT button several times till it was right.
2) There's noticeable "screendoor"
3) The colors just aren't +right+. I tweaked on it for a good hour or more, and never was able to get things to look correct. Kind of close maybe, but not right.
4) The contrast ratio is just not good for home theater. The ae900u was 5500:1, which I thought was pretty good, maybe not fantastic, but OK. The casio is 1800:1 and it completely shows. Blacks aren't black. There's noticeable bleed through. Dark scenes are muddy, and just don't look good at all.
5) It's just not sharp. Even HD material through the HDMI port appears somewhat fuzzy. I'm suspecting the lower resolution.
6) It's got video in, standard computer VGA in and HDMI in, but no svideo or composite in. Not a huge downer, but worth pointing out.
7) It's got no lens shift, so getting it to project to your screen is a LOT of trial and error. Fortunately, in a normal HT environment, that should be too much of a downer.


Long story short, the xj-a140 (and it's brethren) would probably work out perfectly well as a REALLY portable movie station for rolling out on the deck and watching movies on a big sheet or on the side of your house. and It'd likely work nicely as a portable projector for business presentations.

But it's just not good enough yet for home theater.

And keep in mind that I am NOT a home theater snob by any stretch. A Runco would be great, but we're talking small to moderate budget here. And we're also talking about a household with exactly 1 (one) TV, which is the one in the family room that get's used every single time we watch any tv at all. So I knew going into the projector arena that we were going to be hitting it likely harder than most people putting in Home theaters would be hitting their projectors.

But, the casio will be going back to BestBuy today, and I'll start looking for something else.

Right now, I'm thinking either
1) another panasonic, either another ae-900u, or maybe an ax200u, AE2000u or AE4000u (though those things are 2000$, which is a tad steep for me).
2) An optoma hd20 (I've read some pretty good things about it) and the bulbs aren't too bad.
3) a Mitsubishi HC5500 (read good stuff on this too, plus I was always VERY happy with my Mitsu 32" tube tv, fantastic life out of that bad boy), but the bulbs on this seem to be pretty pricy.

[Vanguard]

I just picked up a Optoma HD66 for our outdoor theater.   It's 120hz and can do 3D with active glasses.   Overall, I'm very happy and impressed with it.   I probably would go higher end for and indoor projector but for our outdoor theater, this projector is really nice.  It pumps out around 2500 lumens and uses a new bulb with a bit longer life (4000 hours).  The bulb is also cheaper than many projector bulbs.

[drventure]

That optoma looks good, but according to projectorcentral's projection calculator, it wouldn't work in my particular room. The zoom isn't quite flexible enough. 

Ah well, just picked up another ae900u off ebay with only 400hrs on a new bulb. I guess I'll just stay with what I know for the time being.

My guess is, in another 2-4 years, we'll really start to see projectors take off in the general home market as the use of high output/long life LED's or lasers start to replace these short lived mercury lamps.

With any luck, this one will last me till then.

[Vanguard]

Well, like I said, I'd go higher end if the projector was for indoors.   I'm one of those people who can easily see the rainbow effect of DLP tv's/projectors.   It bugs the crap out of me.   I'd opt for a 3 chip DLP solution or an LCD over a single chip DLP.   The main reason I went with the Optoma is the brightness, 120hz, had a 20% off coupon from Dell small business and the weather was going to be really nice this weekend and wanted to do a showing of Avatar.   My old projector wasn't HD and I didn't want to dull the Avatar experience for the audience.